In recent years, it has been said more and more frequently that the old saying that Europe comes out of every crisis that affects it stronger and closer together is starting to lose its relevance. Indeed, it is impossible to think or to argue that the solutions found to the sovereign debt crisis or Brexit, which will see the EU amputated, have been particularly fertile ground for integration; these sombre events seemed instead to herald the process of disintegration of the European project, under the impetus of societies that were angry and leaders who were cowardly in their opportunism.
A decision made a long way away from ‘Brussels’, in Washington, may radically change everything. In a recent book (which will very soon be reviewed in the Bibliothèque européenne), Christian Deubner has no illusions as to the possibility the European Union may adopt foreign, security and defence policies worthy of the name without the level of threat increasing sharply and certain alternative forms of cooperation disappearing or changing beyond all recognition. For the author of “Security and Defence Cooperation in the EU” (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft), this was not something desperately to be wished for.
This, indeed, is the terrifying ‘gift’ that Washington has just given the Europeans. By unilaterally deciding to take the United States out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, which was negotiated over twelve long years under the leadership of the Europeans and approved in 2015 by a unanimous Security Council, Donald Trump has triggered a geopolitical earthquake the epicentre of which is the Near and Middle East, or in Europe’s immediate neighbourhood. All at once, this time, as their own interests in security terms are directly at stake, the Europeans can no longer afford to stay in the public gallery and do nothing.
The Twenty-Seven – and even the Twenty-Eight, as the ‘special relationship’ with the United States of British fantasy is now a burst bubble – have to face the evidence that, as French political observer Pascal Boniface points out, “for Trump, there are no partners, there are only vassals who must line up meekly behind Washington” (Mediapart, 11 May). This extremely disagreeable observation forces them to realise, as his Belgian colleague Sven Biscop puts it, that “European and American priorities, and even interests, coincide far less automatically than before” (http://www.egmontinstitute.be , 9 May). At the end of the day, they must finally admit and understand that “nobody is going to defend the European interest in Europe’s place”.
Does this mean that for the Europeans and their leaders, it is time for some major changes to be made and that they must break with an Atlantic Alliance in which partnership has been transformed into servitude? After all, as our colleague Philip Stevens point out, “if the US intends to act as a rogue state, blind to the views of its allies, there is no longer the glue left to hold together an Atlantic partnership that long assumed a coincidence of values as well as interests” (Financial Times, 10 May). However, the Atlantic Alliance still has its uses. Firstly, because Donald Trump will not be President forever – it is even to be hoped that he will get just the one term in office. Secondly, because in spite of the more sinister buffoonery of the current tenant of the White House, Western values and interests still exist and, no doubt about it, will continue to do so.
However, the Europeans are now being forced to take note, along with Pascal Boniface, of the fact that if “the Atlantic Alliance was a form of protection, Trump wants to make it into servitude”, which is detrimental to 27 national sovereignties and even to British sovereignty. Clearly, therefore, it is time for the member states to recognise that these national sovereignties cannot be effectively defended and reaffirmed in the world unless, through them, a European sovereignty in its own right takes shape! It is a sovereign European Union that must now, as it is invited to do by Sven Biscop, invest “more than ever” in the Atlantic Alliance, whilst at the same time investing “in partnerships (not alliances – not yet) with other powers (…) in order to pursue its priorities with all possible partners”.
What it all boils down to is that the time has come for the European Union to grow up politically and finally to take its own destiny in hand. These are difficult times, given the decades of procrastination that precede them, but there are some encouraging signs.
First of all, there is the fact that up to now, the Twenty-Seven – and even the Twenty-Eight – are putting on a united front. Then, there are the calls in favour of European sovereignty confirmed by President Macron at the award ceremony of the Charlemagne Prize in Aachen. These calls are the best of all responses to the “impulse to destroy” which the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, speaking at the European University Institute of Florence, implicitly imputed to the American President.
If European leaders will lend the French President their ear and, in the dangerously chaotic world in which we live, put all their efforts, with no further prevarication, into building a European sovereignty, then Donald Trump will go down in history as the last ‘founding father of Europe’!
Michel Theys